Base Building Development

I've been enjoying playing this game solo and have started developing a subset of rules for base building.  This will effectively replace the night phase with a set of new moves based on which buildings you have built and how you have deployed your survivors to work in buildings.  As always my design is shaped by wanting the player to  have to make difficult decisions each move.

In the initial game design (during the OPR Game Jam), I went back and forth between collecting specific resources (food, building materials, books, etc) and decided to stick with one generic resource, simply called Scavenge.  I like the idea of having to make really tough decisions with these generic raw resources.  Do I feed everyone or build something new that will allow us to expand later?  Do I build a barrack to house more people or do I build a weapon shop to equip those we have with better equipment, and send the homeless out into the cold night to freeze?

I often get stuck while designing so I like to bounce back and forth between game design, presentation and other areas.  Here is a test card I mocked up for playtesting.  I'm going for a frozen panel type look and there's still work to do there, trying to balance theme with readability.

I want to keep this very simple, so we have a kitchen.  It costs two raw resources to build (right supply crates).  You can deploy up to 3 survivors to the kitchen, and for each of them you get to take the "Cook" move during the Night Phase.  As with the rest of the game, a great success is pretty rare and often you are going to have to sacrifice something.

I think the balance will be the hardest thing to manage, so I'll do some automated playtesting just to see how things mathematically can play out.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the original game!  If you have played it, please comment or send me a direct message.  I'd love to hear how it went.

Erik Battle (Codexier)